Robert Rauschenberg
(1925-2008)

It was like 10 cents for a quart can downtown, because nobody knew what
color it was.  I would just go and buy a whole mess of paint, and the only organization, choice or discipline was that I had to use some or all of it, and I wouldn't buy any more paint until I'd used that up.
[quoted in catalog to Color Chart exhibition at MoMA 2008]

Robert Rauschenberg

I think you're born an artist or not.  I couldn't have learned it.  And I hope I never do because knowing more only encourages your limitations.

Man Ray
(1890-1976)

There is no progress in art, any more than there is progress in making love.
There are simply different ways of doing it.

Odilon Redon

My drawings inspire, and are not to be defined.  They place us, as music does, in the ambiguous realm of the undetermined.

Jonathan Rée

Works of art, however beautiful they are, will fail if they are phony, imperceptive, stupid or obtuse; and that works that disappoint the adepts of beauty may still articulate issues about the world and the way it presents itself to our senses.  If a work does not achieve beauty, it may still bear witness to truth. [Prospect March 2009]

Ad Reinhardt
(1913-1967)

Sculpture is what you bump into when you’re trying to get a good look at a painting.

Pierre-Auguste Renoir
(1841-1919)

If you can explain a picture, it wouldn't be art.  Shall I tell you what I think are the two qualities of a work of art? First, it must be indescribable, and, second, it must be inimitable.  [In interview with Walter Pach 1912]

Pierre-Auguste Renoir

A picture should be pleasing, cheerful and pretty - yes, pretty!  There are plenty of dull things in life without creating any more.  I know people aren’t willing to admit that a picture can be a great painting if it is a cheerful one.  Because Fragonard laughed, he was soon classified as a minor artist.  Cheerful people aren't taken seriously.  Art got up in a pompous fashion will always impress.  
[Quoted in Francois Fosca, Renoir: His Life and Work, 1962]

Pierre-Auguste Renoir

I consider women writers, lawyers, and politicians. . . as monsters. . . The woman artist is merely ridiculous.  

Pierre-Auguste Renoir

The work of art must seize you, wrap you up in itself, carry you away.  

Pierre-Auguste Renoir

Why should beauty be suspect?  

William Riley

Just because I made a painting, doesn't mean I know all there is to know about it.  

Diego Rivera
(1886-1957)

To be an artist, one must first be a man vitally concerned with all problems of social struggle. . . never withdrawing from life.

Diego Rivera

If it isn't propaganda, it isn't art.

Diego Rivera

Art has always been employed as an instrument of domination.

Norman Rockwell

I showed the America I know and observed to others who might not have noticed.

Auguste Rodin
(1840-1917)

Great works of art, which are the highest proof of human intelligence and sincerity, say all that can be said on man and on the world, and besides, they teach that there is something more that cannot be known . . .We (artists) are misunderstood.  Lines and colors are only to us symbols of hidden realities.  Our eyes plunge beneath the surface to the hidden meaning of things, and when afterwards we reproduce the form, we endow it with the spiritual meaning which it covers. An artist worthy of the name should express all the truth of nature, not only the exterior truth, but also, and above all, the inner truth.
[Art, 1912]

Will Rogers

The Venus de Milo is a good example of what happens to somebody who won't stop biting her fingernails.

Harold Rosenberg
(1906-1978)

Art cannot confront society except in acts of originality, which official culture succeeds in absorbing but by which people are nevertheless changed in unoredictable ways.

James Rosenquist
(born 1933)

It was startling and incredible.  But I couldn’t get a handle on one piece – I looked at it for 2 hours, I couldn’t even realize a question out of it.
[On visiting Robert Rauschenberg and seeing new his work at 3:00 am]

Susan Rothenburg

You make art by taking a lot of time looking at it.

Mark Rothko
(1903-1970)

There is more power in telling little than in telling all. 
[Lecture to the Pratt Institute, 1958]

Mark Rothko

Pictures must be miraculous: the instant one is completed, the intimacy between creation and creator is ended. He is an outsider. The picture must be for him, as for anyone experiencing it later, a revelation, an unexpected and inprecedented resolution of an eternally familiar need.  [winter 1947-48]

Mark Rothko

To paint a small picture is to place yourself outside your experience.  However you paint the larger picture, you are in it.

Edward Rothstein

The Western heritage really is imposing, despite its flaws and failures.  The West, in its Enlightenment enterprise, has, over the centuries, given other cultures the most devoted appreciation, or, at the very least, dedicated scrutiny.  That is why anthropology and ethnology are Western disciplines, just as the museum is a Western institution.  No other culture has any comparable approach to the Other in its midst.  For similar reasons immigrants flock to the supposedly intolerant West. 
[New York Times, November 25, 2011]

Georges Rouault
(1871-1958)

For me, painting is a way to forget life.  It is a cry in the night, a strangled laugh.

Georges Rouault

Subjective artists are one-eyed, but objective artists are blind.

Donald Rumsfeld

There are known knowns. These are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns. That is to say, there are things that we know we don’t know. But there are also unknown unknowns. There are things we don’t know we don’t know.  [March 2003]

John Ruskin
(1819-1900)

Great nations write their autobiographies in three manuscripts, the book of their deeds, the book of their words, and the book of their art.  Not one of these books can be understood unless we read the two others, but of the three the only trustworthy one is the last.

John Ruskin

You do not educate a man by telling him what he knows not but by making him what he was not.

John Ruskin

Quality is never an accident. It is the result of an intelligent effort to produce a superior product.

John Russell

When art is made new, we are made new with it.  We have a sense of solidarity with our own time, and of psychic energies shared and redoubled, which is just about the most satisfying thing that life has to offer.  [The Meanings of Modern Art]